A few years ago, a First Nations fellow named Hartley GoodWeather published a crime novel starring photographer and ex-cop Thumps DreadfulWater.

Given those semi-puckish names, there was clearly more to the story, and it wasn’t long before Thumps’s creator was revealed to be Thomas King, the Canadian-American, Cherokee-Greek author of glorious novels, short stories, scripts and non-fiction – including the award-winning, best-selling The Inconvenient Indian.

Now and then, King continues to dip his literary fingertips into crime fiction and the vagaries of Thumps’s life in the town of Chinook in the northwestern U.S. There, a comfortable distance from a past personal tragedy when he was still a cop in California, he lives among residents just as entertaining as he is.

Those characters — including his ferociously independent womanfriend Claire, his cat Freeway, a Russian mechanic, a prickly café owner, a long-time sheriff, and a chorus of other colourful locals — may not always add much in terms of plot.

But in A Matter of Malice, King’s latest, everyone including Freeway contributes to the tone and colour of a book that, beyond and besides crime and suspense, manages to be fun to read.

First Nations politics have cropped up in at least one previous Thumps novel. This time, though, the focus is mainly on reality television, specifically a true-crime program called Malice Aforethought, which focuses on suspicious cold cases.

With an actor in decline as narrator, a less-than-charming producer, and her partner, the deeply prepared researcher Nina Maslow, the Malice Aforethought crew turns up in Chinook aiming to delve into the long-ago death of a troubled young rich woman presumed at the time to be either suicide or misadventure.

There seem to be no particular indications that Trudy Samuels did not hurl herself, accidentally or on purpose, into a chasm, but Nina and her colleagues arrive determined to prove murder, and to recruit Thumps and his ex-cop investigatory skills into their cause.

At the same time, a friend has wrecked Thumps’s car, he can’t get in touch with Claire, his cat has disappeared, and he has himself just been diagnosed with diabetes. His life already seems too fraught to start dabbling in death, but for one reason and another, he winds up stuck into the case.

Trudy’s unpleasant widowed stepmother has insisted from the start that Trudy was killed by another loner with whom she was very close in high school, a First Nations boy who’s since become a famous and successful author. The TV show’s ostensible purpose is to stage an accusatory confrontation between the step-mother and the author, Tobias Rattler.

But things aren’t entirely as they seem, and against his will Thumps gets drawn in, partly from loyalty to certain locals and partly because he’s promised that in return for his help, he’ll get information on a crime from his past that still haunts him and drove him out of policing.

Matters get far more dire and complicated when Nina dies at the same place and in the same way as Trudy did years ago, and Thumps has to figure out if the deaths are somehow connected, and who may be responsible.

All that is more or less standard crime fiction: who does what to whom why? What’s special is Thumps’s voice, both in his thoughts and in delicious, often enough irrelevant dialogue with the characters around him.

He’s poignant and thoughtful and very funny, which happens to fit him neatly among the people of King’s poignant, thoughtful, very funny non-crime fiction, too.